ToonMarty title cards... episodes I boarded

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Yawn

A little something I did for Sardine Productions early this year. Haven't posted in a while, been crazy busy working on a show called Ugly Americans, the best show I have ever worked on.

Elephant and giraffe walk cycle

Here's a little walk cycle I did for Sardine Productions. It's part of a short I animated for them. It is based on Mordillo, a comic strip artist and animator that was very popular in the 70's and 80's.

drawing even more badly

When I did this first sketch, I thought it looked pretty badly drawn. I can see a Beavis and Butthead influence here. But they wanted it drawn even more badly than this! I was threatening to draw with my left hand on the next attempt. I am not left handed.

relying on the past

Another screen shot from a couple years ago. When I have nothing new to post, I can always dig up something from past productions. Looking back on all my "Pete and Bob" posts, I am surprised I did not post a lot more from this project. This is a shot from the intro of the show, one of the few times we get to see Karzinki the driver, and Pete and Bob on the back of the garbage truck, all in the same shot.

drawing ugly on purpose

These screen shots are from a project a couple of years ago. Click on the "Pete and Bob" label to see the other posts. It was stressed upon me to make it look "drawn really badly." It is actually more difficult to draw ugly than it is to draw a good design. It is not easy to unlearn everything you know.

God light

This is from a pilot I did a couple of years ago. The light of God from Heaven shines down upon our two garbage men. This would have been a fantastic show, the direction I was going in was something new and funny. We were really on to something with this...and then it all went down hill. Instead of having a discussion about things, bad decisions were being made by the producer and the creators that I was forced to comply with. Things were not thought out and debated, explained and defended. It's a shame too, because this project had some good potential.

2 headed alien

This is the last of the screen shots from an episode of "MY GOLDFISH IS EVIL." The show airs on CBC on Saturday morning. This particular episode is called "JET STREAM ADVENTURE", and it is written and storyboarded by Errol Burke and myself, and produced by Sardine Productions.

Cyborg

In the series there is a character named Scoop. He is an old man that owns a news stand. He has a wooden leg and a glass eye. The glass eye is not at all readable; for one thing, the pupil moves around like a normal eye. It just looks like a normal eye. Nobody watching the show would ever guess that he has a glass eye. So in this episode we made the old man a cyborg and made sure his artificial eye was clearly artificial, we even had him pop his mechanical eye out of the socket.

Aliens

I was not pleased with the character designs in this episode of "My Goldfish Is Evil." Errol and I wrote a fun, inspiring, outer space adventures. We were supposed to be on the character design team at Sardine Productions for season 2 of "My Goldfish Is Evil", but we were not. When I saw the character designs, I was disappointed. The character design team had a chance to go nuts designing all kinds of interesting aliens, the possibilities were only limited to the designers imagination. Instead, the character designs were weak and uninspired. There were a few exception, I really liked the 3 eyed Alien Stanford character and the Desmonite character.

giant iguanna

In the script we tried to make Alien Stanford really LOVE his giant iguana, Lucy. A guy in love with a lizard is damn funny.

The Desmonite

One of my favorite characters to draw is Desmona, or in this outer space adventure episode, we made her into a Medusa type alien named The Desmonite. She was the most sympathetic character in the whole series, and the only archetypal character with a clear personality.

Shrimp Guys

These are one of my favorite designs in the series, the SEA DUDES, designed by Errol Burke. I'm glad we got to bring them back for this episode. They are too funny looking not to be seen again after just one episode.

Starfish Heads

The sequence with these Starfish Head aliens was pretty exciting. It got chopped a bit for time, which was not a problem at all, we boarded a long space ship chase so that there was room to edit scenes out of the sequence without effecting the story. The voice that was chosen and the voice acting is not even close to what I had in mind for the Starfish Heads. It's a shame that my involvement in this production ended once the board was done. The fact that Errol and I wrote the script and did the storyboard, you would think that there would be some communication with us during the production of our episode. But there was none. Even if I wasn't working on the show once the board was done, I would have loved to come in and see the progress being made on our episode.

Thing Zao

In the series there is an Asian character named Ting Zao. So for this outer space adventure episode we turned him into a tentacled alien called Thing Zao. He is animated extremely well, with the tentacles and all. I would have liked to have his tentacles colored the same light blue as his head though. The animation in this episode is outstanding. The problem is with the background colors, it looks very dated, like a show from the mid 90's when photoshop was starting to be used instead of traditionally painted backgrounds. The BG's in this series look way too airbrushed, with gradients on everything, and the colors are far too dark. The background designs themselves are excellent. The BG design team did a great job. Alain Coudry, Rodolphe Thuaud, and Robert Rivard's backgrounds were brilliant. Check out Robert's POST IT blog!

Emperor Bubbles

Some screen shots of Emperor Bubbles. I am not sure if it just because he has a human body in this episode, but these shots are far more interesting and have more personality in them than other episodes I have seen. It's difficult to to emote when you have no body, and no posture to pose, and no arms and hands to gesture with. Overall I am happy with how he turned out, even though I wish he had a skull cap.

skull cap

One of the things I wanted to do was give Emperor Bubbles a thing on his head, like Ming The Merciless would have on Flash Gordon. Again, it would have made him more retro sci-fi looking and less Darth Vaderish looking. It would only have required a couple of lines across his head and a different color on top of his head. But I was told that it would require more work and more coloring, and so the cap on his head was rejected. It was an unfortunate decision, he would have been so much better with it on. But that was one issue I did not feel like arguing over, so I let it go. The over all retro 1950's sci fi theme was not pushed in the design of the show. When we wrote the script we were expecting to also be on the character design team, so we thought we would be in house, in the studio, to make sure that the designs were what we envisioned for the episode. Unfortunately, we were not working in the studio for season 2, and many of the character designs strayed from the retro theme. For instance; there was a Robo Cop character designed. We didn't use him at all, and pretty much threw out that page of the model pack.

Is this a joke?!

When we wrote the script, we specifically described this contraption as a "War Of The Worlds" type machine. It should have had long spidery legs or tentacles and roundish head, very retro looking. Instead; as we were storyboarding, I saw this in the model pack. I was sure it had to be a joke. I added the testicles in blue pencil and Errol added the main character bent over ready to be humbled by the phallic creation. Then I realized that it was not a joke. This is actually the model we were expected to use. There was no way we were going to use this horrible thing, not only was it extremely phallic, it was not what we described in the script, it was not retro and did not resemble "War Of The Worlds", it was completely wrong. So we just did our own design and said to hell with design in the model pack. I was sure this would get changed back to the phallic drill by someone in the studio doing storyboard corrections, but to my surprise, as you can see by the screen shots above...it stayed in!

end credits

The end credits of My Gold Fish Is Evil is the best part of the whole show. It looks different than the show, it is full of quick zooms in and out and is pretty exciting.

on the air

Sorry about the poor picture quality, but these screen shots are taken from a VHS tape that I recorded with my VCR. Now I know how my parents felt when I was a kid and they were still using an 8 track player when I was using cassette tapes and a Sony Walkman. Anyway, this is from an episode of My Gold Fish Is Evil. It was written and storyboarded by Errol Burke and myself. As far as Gold Fish episodes go, I think it is the best one I have seen, but that is not saying much. After I watched this episode, I watched an episode of My Gym Partner's A Monkey. What a difference!! My Gym Partner's A Monkey is fantastic, hilarious, excellently paced, great voice acting, timing, great gags, great designs. The Episode I saw was the one with the koala girl, Deidre. It was brilliant. It's everything Goldfish should have been, but is not. There is a long laundry list of things I hate about My Goldfish Is Evil. I won't rant about that right now. Instead I will enjoy my moment in the pic above.